Music Time Capsule ---- Log # 3, The Lady Wore Black

22 November 2017

Mark Antony Rossi

I first learned of Queensryche while living in Texas. I was undergoing USAF Technical training at a Northern Texas base when I met up with a friend who had a line into meeting some Army nurse girls also stationed on the base. His dorm was farther out than mine and while visiting him I heard Geoff Tate for the first time in my life. He was singing "The Lady Wore Black" on the radio. A rock station was playing their self-titled EP in its entirety. I stood there at the open dorm room listening until the airman on the bed walked up to me and said hello.

We become fast friends and I visited him often discussing metal and music in general. He was the first guy I met who actually liked the Southern Metal groups like Molley Hatchet and Black Oak Arkansas. I turned him on to German metal like Scorpions and Accept. My metal journey started in Texas but then moved to Northern California where I discovered Metallica and bought Queensryche's first full LP "The Warning."

I befriended a Southern California kid who loved being stationed in California because he still lived at home and might never move out. I hung out with this guy so much his parents actually called me by my first name (a rare thing in the military.) From there he told me he had a gay uncle who lived in San Francisco and he wanted to go visit him. His uncle knew something about the music business and I was game to check out San Francisco for the first time. We saw the whole town and the guy was cool.
A few months later he tells me he got backstage passes to talk to Dio who is putting on a show in Sacramento which is about an hour from our base. Will and I went and loved the show. Dio never disappoints. We met him and his lovely wife Wendy who was managing a local band called Rough Cutt. They opened for Dio. They were not bad but I told her she should check out Black N Blue because that band was going places. Ha. What do I know. I grew up in the birth place of Frank Sinatra.

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